Visual Artist

Danielle Atkins

NEW YORK, USA

Danielle Baron Atkins is a painter working in Brooklyn and Woodstock, NY. Her work examines the female form as well as the many roles of women in our contemporary society. She abstracts, dissects, and exaggerates the female form.

The women she depicts sit and stand in suggestive poses, often wearing stilettos. These anonymous figures exude sexuality, fertility, and motherhood. She utilizes a juxtaposition of delicate, stereotypically “feminine” colors with repetitive, aggressive, graffiti-like markings. Danielle repurposes remnants of her children’s discarded belongings such as broken headphones (used during school lock downs), worn out crocks and skateboarding sneakers, underwear bands that have lost their elasticity, socks and mittens that have abandoned their partner, candy wrappers, torn vintage comic books found under her children’s beds, old cookbooks, pill bottle tops, cardboard packages, and junk mail to accentuate her underlying themes.

Motherhood has deeply affected her art making process. Danielle’s sharp observations of the roles and struggles of women create an ever-evolving definition of womanhood.

What are you making right now?

I am continuing to create large scale constructions as well as sculpting abstracted heads from clay. Visions and Versions of Jacob, is a series of fired clay heads. They reflect the evolution of my art making from an increasing dimensionality on canvas through the use of found objects to a fully three dimensional exploration in clay. Jacob’s head becomes a constantly reimagined vessel to explore Jewish mysticism, strength and fragility, and to pay homage to the ancient wisdom of my ancestors, the Jewish People. They are a push and pull between the ancient and the new. Each head creates a different visceral reaction in the viewer yet they are tied together through a reoccurring motif of ladders with 18 rungs.

If you could spend an hour with anyone you admire, living or dead, who would it be and what would you ask them?

My paternal Grandfather. He was killed when my Father was 1 in Israel’s war for Independence. I would like to ask him what is was like to leave his family to flee Nazi occupied Berlin and start a new life.

What would you like people to understand about your work?

My gaze looks both inward, at the ever-changing female body and its perceptions as an object of desire, stability and resentment, and outward, to a broader world increasingly dominated by consumerism, isolation and antisemitism.

What medium do you work in and what drew you to it?

These large scale constructions on canvas as well as clay heads are inspired by my experiences as a Jewish wife and mother raising three boys in a chaotic and often hostile modern world. The stories of Tamar, Ruth and Jacob are woven together with intimate and everyday objects such as Israeli fruit boxes with the discarded belongings of my children infused with thread, staples and paint. Physical objects and stories from the Torah are ignited in the female form, revealing a simultaneously sacred and threatened identity landscape.

What do you need in your workspace to spark creativity?

I need my collage materials and a working stapler.

Has your identity, culture, heritage, or community influenced your creative practice?

My current work explores the search for transcendence in the face of the realities of a post October 7th world. Since that fateful date, a search for answers and meaning has driven me to augment my exploration of what it means to be a modern Jewish and Israeli woman with the fundamental questions of humanity and morality to be found in the study of ancient Jewish texts.

What does success look like to you as a creative?

Success is having an urge to make art every day.